Gnosticism
emerged as an important and influential stream of thought in the
West, but its depth and diversity have been obscured by clichés.
Present discussion, even while claiming to be fresh and original,
often perpetuates the reduction of Gnostic insights to banal truisms
of fashion. Fortunately, the wealth of text available today offers
the prospect that Gnosticism might break through the prejudgments
that have consigned it to marginal status.

Between
the late first century and the end of the fourth century of the
Common Era, Gnosticism sought for a single, integrating insight into
the divine world amid conflicting religious traditions. Gnostics
wanted direct contact with the divine apart from parochial
requirements, peculiar customs, and ethnic preferences. Traditional
religions talked about transcendence, but they restricted the
delivery of their truths to their different constituencies, which
were limited and often mutually exclusive, defined by race, history,
family, or status.

The power of
Gnosticism transformed the face of Greco-Roman religion: many
religious movements were influenced by it. Gnostic questers pioneered
an approach to religious truth that was based on knowledge rather
than faith, practice, or formal organization. The Christian church,
the Jewish synagogue, the guild of adepts in the Mysteries find no
real counterpart among the Gnostics. They pursued knowledge (gnosis
in Greek) so intently that they came to be called gnostikoi.
If the word “knowledgist” existed in English, that would
be a good translation.

The intellectual
environment established by Gnosticism was one of the factors in
Christianity’s emergence as a viable religio
in Antiquity, rather than as a superstitio,
the legal status the Roman Empire initially gave the new faith.
Christ became a symbol of how any person, Jew or Gentile, slave or
free, male or female, could come to know God and be known by God (as
Paul said in Galatians). But as often happens in the history of
persecution, those who had been victims, after attaining a position
of privilege, were not inclined to renounce the methods of repression
under which they once suffered. For example, Christian mobs rioted
against pagans in Alexandria in 415 CE, encouraged by Cyril, the local
bishop; they dragged the Neo-Platonist philosopher Hypatia from her
chariot, stripped and flayed her -- and then burned her alive. The
emergent Orthodoxy sanctioned by the Empire clearly put limits on the
understanding of how much knowledge was compatible with faith.

The rise of
restrictive forms of Orthodoxy brought the repression of texts as
well as people. The fear that Gnostic sources might be destroyed is
the most likely reason for which an entire library of works was
deposited near Nag Hammadi in Egypt during the fourth century. The
discovery of that library in 1945 opened up a fresh interest in these
gospels and related writings.

Perhaps
inevitably, scholarly interest sometimes tipped into uncritical
enthusiasm. It is frequently said, for example, that scholars never
had direct access to such sources before the discovery, but only to
what the Gnostics’ opponents (Irenaeus, and Clement and
Tertullian above all) had to say. In fact, the Pistis
Sophis (which
means “Faith-Wisdom”) has been known since the eighteenth
century and the Gospel
of Mary
since the nineteenth century.

This enthusiasm
has fed the rise of neo-Gnosticism, a modern revival greatly
encouraged by the discovery at Nag Hammadi. In co-opting these
ancient sources, the neo-Gnostics are unlike their ancient
counterparts. They want to embrace the earth, while Gnostics often
shunned the earth; they don’t wish to be elitist, although many
Gnostics claimed to be a class apart from humanity at large. Above
all, neo-Gnostics want to insist on the gender-equality of women with
men. Those are aims I happen to agree with, but you need to
cherry-pick Gnostic sources and ignore a great deal of what they say
to make that picture work as an account of the Nag Hammadi library.

Gnosticism has yet
to be evaluated in the light of its own sources because two
prejudgments have stood in the way of fair reading. One prejudgment
dismisses Gnostics as heretics, in the tradition of Cyril of
Alexandria. The other imagines that, because Gnostics were repressed
by the Orthodox, it must be that the Gnostics themselves embraced
diversity. Neither of these pictures is plausible.

To judge from the
rich literature discovered near Nag Hammadi, Gnostics were not only
productive of a diverse literature, they also pursued different kinds
of gnosis.
Some of them took up the ancient Near Eastern theme of Wisdom as a
divine personification so that knowing Wisdom – accepting her
as one’s Mother, as The
Teaching of Silvanus says --
meant that a person could come to an awareness of the divine in its
intersection with the world all around us. Yet other texts from Nag
Hammadi are dualistic in insisting upon an impermeable divide between
good and evil, light and dark, in the manner of Zoroastrianism,
another source of the movement. For dualistic Gnostics, Wisdom is not
truly divine, but actually an hysterical divinity, who in her
confusion produced the phenomenal world that seems alive, but is only
corruption.

The distinction
between non-dualistic and dualistic Gnosis is basic, and some
scholars focus on that distinction to the exclusion of others. In my
opinion, however, two other types of gnosis
(which sometimes intersect with one another as well as with other
types) also need to be taken into account as one reads the Nag
Hammadi library. In order to investigate sources far more
particularistic than the universal gnosis
they sought, some Gnostics raised revisionist reading to an art form:
making the snake in Eden and Cain into heroes, for example, and
portraying Jesus as laughing during the crucifixion, since his true
nature could not be harmed. And finally, many Gnostics eagerly
entered into philosophical inquiry and engaged the Neo-Platonists of
their age in debate concerning the ultimate structure of reality and
how people could be understood as eternal.

In its vigorous
quest for different kinds of knowledge, sometimes gnosis
of the Wisdom that unites all things in heaven and earth, sometimes
gnosis
of the stark contrast between true reality and this false world in
which we live, sometimes involving radical revisionism regarding
ancient sources as well as philosophical debate, the Gnostics we meet
in the pages of the Nag Hammadi speak beyond the fashions that later
lined up for and against them. Instead, they inform us of how meaning
can be sought and parochial truths transformed in the thirst for
enduring knowledge.